The current invention is in the technical field of the positioning platforms (absolute/relative) and associated computations for safety applications in the automotive industry. More particularly this invention is in the field of absolute/relative GPS/GNSS/Odometer/IMU/Radar/Video absolute/relative positioning devices for safety applications in the automotive industry.
The navigational devices installed in the cars today are GPS devices with an accuracy ranging from 2-3 meters to 10-15 meters. Because of the low GPS positioning accuracy, the car GPS navigational devices are not used for roadway safety applications. These GPS navigational devices are only used for navigational purposes providing directions to navigate the cars from the current location to a user predefined destination. The various devices installed in the cars today including radar sensors, video cameras, GPS devices, odometers process the information independently and do not combine all this information optimally in a central processor either installed inside a host vehicle (moving vehicle) or in a cloud-server to determine absolute position and orientation (pitch, yaw and roll) of a host vehicle (moving vehicle) and its relative position and orientation (pitch, yaw and roll) relative to the other cars (vehicles) in the network.
The current GPS navigation devices have low accuracy and they are not integrated with the other sensors, such as odometers, Inertial Navigation (Measurement) (IMUs), video cameras for safety applications, relative-positioning devices (e.g., radars), Vehicle-To(2)-Vehicle (V2V), and Vehicle-To(2)-Infrastructure (V2I) communications. The lack of positioning accuracy, the absence of orientation information and the lack of integration with other sensors, such as those mentioned above, prevent the current GPS navigation devices from being used for safety applications aiming to reduce and/or to eliminate accidents, by issuing warnings to the drivers, or directly interfacing with the controls of the host vehicle to prevent unavoidable accidents.